Q&A: Edward Burtynsky on Oil

For nearly a decade, Edward Burtynsky’s photography has helped shape perceptions of some of the world’s most remote and colossal industrial sites, from the Three Gorges Dam in China to New Brunswick oil refineries. The St. Catharines, Ont.-born artist, who spent his formative years exposed to sites at General Motors plants and the St. Lawrence Seaway in that city, went on to study photography at Ryerson University in Toronto, before founding Toronto Image Works, a traditional and new media digital photo laboratory. The Post’s Jason Rehel sat down with Burtynsky recently at his downtown Toronto studio to chat about his current touring exhibition, Oil.

Q

There seems to be a neutrality or critical space in these works on the oil industry that allows viewers to come to their own decisions about the subject matter. They don’t condemn any particular activity outright. Was that your intention?

A

I wouldn’t use the word neutrality, I’d use the word ambiguity. I think if you go through the whole Oil book, from front to back, I think it would be hard to walk away with the opinion that the work is saying everything is OK with the world. I think [the exhibit] raises questions about reach and overreach and the consequences of these activities. So ultimately, I think there’s a voice of concern that sits behind the work. But it isn’t front and centre. The fact that the work functions in this attraction/repulsion [dynamic] means you’re drawn to the image because there’s something going on that makes you want to enter and engage with that picture. And I think in a world where billions of pictures are made, making images that engage people isn’t necessarily very easy.

(laughs) At the end of the day, as a visual artists, my audience is people who are interested in coming to galleries to experience how we understand the world visually. As humans, we still absorb 70% of our knowledge through our eyes. And I think the photograph, in this still and quiet way, penetrates our consciousness.

Q

You’d been working in your distinctive large-scale photo style since the early 1980s, but in 1997, you turned the lens on industrial processes and specifically energy extraction and production. What happened that year to sharpen your focus?

A

Things were starting to gel in my work. But there was also a discussion on the CBC program Ideas in 1995 talking about the Exxon Valdez accident, which was caused by human error, creating one of the worst natural disasters in a pristine environment, especially given the type of oil and the thousands of miles of shoreline. So after that, by 2004, the oil industry had to create double-hulled tankers, since that would have prevented that sort of spill and could deal with [future] human error. And although there were some around at the time, most tankers were still single-hull and they’d have to be decommissioned.

Q

So that led to your first ship-breaking series.

A

Correct. And yeah, that’s when I started to research that area, as that industry exploded. And while I started researching ship-breaking, I was working my way through a new body of work on tailings and the mining industry. I went up to Sudbury, Ont., to do tailings specifically, and it occurred to me at that time that we’ve always taken from nature. And I thought, well, “What’s facilitating the speed and scale of that taking?”

Q

So

,

was there a sort of “aha moment” that occurred?

A

I was speeding down the asphalt road, in my car, and I had just finished filling it with gas and it’s lubricated by oil and I was going to see these big machines taking apart a landscape and reprocessing it and it occurred to me that for the same reason that I thought it was interesting to show those mines and those tailings — since mines and tailings are direct results of building metropolises, building a middle class and allowing all these people to engage with material goods — because we don’t see them [at their origins], we don’t see the destructive acts and waste necessary to create what we have. So ultimately, while I was trying to reconnect the disconnect of those landscapes, I was driving there and I thought: “I didn’t know the other side of mining … But I don’t know the other side of oil, either.”

Q

The human being plays a much different role in your work than in more traditional portraiture, or even more humanist versions of landscapes such as the pastoral. Are you using humans to show scale and implicate them in these activities? If so, isn’t there a kind of hopelessness in those figures and for us?

A

If I had to say what is the ethos of my work, it’s a lament for the loss of nature at the hand of man. To me, it’s man’s engagement with the planet that’s interesting, so in all of my landscapes, man is implied, not necessarily as a portrait of man, but as a portrait of man’s work, and man’s reshaping of the natural world.

Q

So man is something of an object in your work?

A

I’m distancing myself. I’m looking at humans as a species on the planet, almost as an outsider, as a kind of rogue looking at my own. If I were to report back to some other intelligence on another planet, to say what are we doing on our planet, I’d make these pictures.

Q

One of your pictures from Oil depicts a high-spirited moment from a NASCAR race (Talladega Speedway No. 1). In it, the viewer can see just how close fans get to the track. Were you out to show that our addiction to fossil fuels has veered closer to being psychological and not merely economic?

A

We love speed. Whereas several thousand years ago, we went to the Coliseum and threw Christians to the lions, now we drive cars really fast in circles and watch crashes. When I made those pictures, I wanted to make pictures that I thought would be interesting in 50 years from now, not today. They’re kind of interesting today, but when oil is going to be $300 and $400 a barrel and almost non-existent in 50 years, this will be something that we did, back when oil was plentiful, an example of how we entertained ourselves with this valuable resource.

Q

What was the biggest challenge logistically making these large-scale photos from bird’s eye views at operating oil sites?

A

Getting access. A lot of industry wouldn’t let me in … a lot of people didn’t see an upside to letting me in. But in a way, I don’t think I’ve betrayed the industry that did. I’m putting this exhibit out as a matter of fact. These are the consequences of what happened when humans discovered oil and the internal combustion engine. This is what we do. And when you see it in aggregate — I look for aggregate moments, when you see many cars, massive amounts of humanity engaged in something around the idea of oil — to me, that was an interesting way to begin to divert our attention from seeing our lives individually. We don’t ever get to see the impact our lives in aggregate. But that happens [when you see images of] mining, clear-cutting, quarries, farming and that happens in the [visual representations of] the oil industry as well.

Q

Speaking of farming, do you have any future plans to do large-scale photography of the agricultural industry?

A

I’m doing that now. I just finished doing California and all of the Imperial Valley and the San Joaquin Valley.

Q

Given that you’ll be part of a symposium at Ryerson next month centred on the political aspects of oil and energy, what do you see your role as being in the discourse, beyond your artistic work?

A

I have two girls, in their teens, and that’s actually shifted a lot of the way that I thought over the last decade or two. I’d like to an advocate for sustainability and the full spectrum of what it means: To be a sustainable society, first and foremost we need to have economies that keep us gainfully employed and able to put food on our table. If it’s the difference between cutting the last tree down, or catching the last fish in the ocean and feeding your family, the choice is always going to be survival. We also need a good jucidiary, a good legal system, that keeps everyone in the same rule of law. And third is the environment — if we destroy our habitat, we have in effect destroyed ourselves.

• Edward Burtynsky: Oil is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum’s Institute for Contemporary Culture until July 3. For details, visit rom.on.ca. Edward Burtynsky: Oil Symposium will take place at Ryerson University May 6 and 7. For details, visit ryersongallery.ca/burtynsky-oil-symposium.

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